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Disrupt SF 2018 was one of the biggest events included in our commercial roadmap. This conference is a “must go” for everyone working in or with technology, which is why we chose it for the official release of Dali’s first version – and it was a blast.

We decided to stay in San Francisco for the week, not only for the event, but also to grab the opportunity of meeting fellow startups and colleagues from the Silicon Valley ecosystem. In the quest for inspiration, we came across HP’s garage in Palo Alto, also known as the birthplace of Silicon Valley.

Disrupt SF started on September 4th with the Welcome Reception at Wework Montgomery Station. But it wasn’t until September 6th, when we were at the Startup Alley, that the real whirl happened. Out of more than 1,000 companies in the areas of AI, Blockchain, Fintech, and Mobility, we realised not even a handful of them had a VR solution for data analytics . Our day exhibiting at Startup Alley was tiring but very rewarding mainly because of the people we met and had the chance to experience our solution and the connections we built.

Besides attending some of the talks and trying the new off-stage “Q&A” area, we met with several investors, which was one of the best parts of Disrupt SF 2018. (Thanks CrunchMatch for providing a good matchmaking between startups and investors!)

Overall, we returned home with a feeling of accomplishment. Dali’s first version is out and we got a bunch of people eager to start using it. Now, our team is going to keep pushing boundaries to ensure we build something that adds real value while transforming your (virtual) reality.

Can you imagine building your own virtual reality world, tailored to your company’s or product needs?

Can you imagine doing it by yourself without the need to gather talented-people on 3D programming and spend months working on it?

You can stop imagining. Now it is possible with Dali!

We are excited to share that we’ll be premiering Dali solution at TechCrunch Disrupt SF (September 5th – 7th).

For the past few months, we’ve been working hard to make this a reality! Our first version is bringing the low code and modular feature into the game. This feature allows users with no 3D programming expertise to build customized VR environments for data visualization in an intuitive and effortless way.

On our last blog post we discussed how VR can help Big Data and the current challenges it faces. By boosting learning through immersion and providing an unlimited representation of data (video, text, audio, you name it) in a natural and intuitive way, VR can truly better the overall experience of working with Big Data. You can grab blocks of data, move around it, unlock your data potential, and finally tame the behemoth of Big Data.

Imagine this: huge chunks of text, numbers and video, with varying degrees of density. You leave your desktop, keyboard and mouse on the side. You grab your VR goggles. Now you are inside a virtual room, where you can say what you want to analyze, grab and manipulate the data with your bare hands. It seems a bit easier to work on Big Data, doesn’t it?

Truth is developing VR environments for Big Data is hard: sourcing different sets of data, allowing different interaction tools to manipulate different types of data sources is anything but easy. Nor cheap.

In fact, we can boil it down to 3 key problems:

It takes a lot of time;

It costs a lot of money;

It demands a high level of expertise.

The cheer complexity of Big Data - defining the scope of a project, allocating resources, organizing the information, and finding the right people to work on it -makes VR for Big Data something cool and disruptive to imagine but utterly difficult to implement. The lack of developer talent in general and experienced VR/AR engineers in particular is a big bump in the road for many companies experimenting with VR. On top of that, very few vendors are on the market, and even fewer can offer VR app development at a reasonable price.

Low-code and its benefits for VR development

So, what needs to be improved? Long delivery time of VR environments for Big Data, high costs for developing environment specific VR experiences, specialized training of people on VR development. That is where the rubber meets the road.

Of all the technologies out there, there is a particular way of creating application software that can help with all of the above problems: low-code development platforms.

Instead of spending time and manual effort to build an app from scratch that is made up of common features and components, low-code platforms work from existing templates and drag prebuilt elements, forms, and objects together to get the working app they need with a lot less difficulties. Above all, it’s crucial that low-code tools are made simple. This way the average business user with no coding experience can quickly develop an app or VR environment to address a specific purpose.

Let’s not kid ourselves: The easier you can build and deploy working apps, the more efficiently your business will run. If it’s to make it cooler interacting with data or to prove to the market you are as disruptive as they come, then using VR to address your Big Data initiatives (or starting them for that matter) might not be for you. On the other hand, if you want to quickly leverage the many benefits VR has for Big Data, it is hard to do so without going low-code. That is what makes most sense for your employees. And at the end of the day, it provides the strongest business case for using VR to boost the positive impact that Big Data can have on our lives.

Big Data is here and is not going anywhere soon. Discussions around its importance for enterprises worldwide, as well as the challenges it poses when implementing, processing, and ultimately benefiting from it, have intensified in recent years. Driving new insights and fostering innovation success rates, decreasing expenses through operational cost efficiencies, accelerating the speed with which new capabilities and services are deployed, you name it – benefits can be manifold. But so can big data challenges: integrating disparate data sources, validating data, ensuring data relevance (according to its context), difficulty in visualizing non-structured and high density data, just to name a few.

Enterprises are now looking for intelligent ways to analyze and explore data so they can transform the way in which they can understand their business and reach their goals much faster. Which means that big data adoption has increased; yet big data ROI is yet to be impressive. For instance, last year, more than half of Fortune 1000 leaders said that their big data initiatives failed to achieve measurable results.

Despite all these problems, there’s a decisive challenge regarding visual analytics (mid-way from data processing and insight/action implementation): its rising complexity. Side by side with visual analytics comes new challenges with rendering, hyper-dimensionality and human cognitive perception limitations.

There is a point to be made that data visualization is the most important stage of data analytics: if you are not uncovering meaningful patterns in your datasets that lead to insights, you may as well not have bothered with the rest of the process at all. Therefore, poor data visualization tools are a cognitive bottleneck on the path between data and discovery.

Can VR really help with that?

Companies not focused in VR are already using VR to visualize their data, e.g. Wall Street Journal, Google, SAP and Salesforce. Furthermore, there are other companies developing visualization products to solve specific needs and data in the areas of engineering, agriculture, projection and 360 degrees videos.

So why can VR help enterprises during this stage of data visualization? We point a few:

Boosted learning:

Interacting within a VR environment provides users with an immersive and focused experience, where distractions from the outside world are limited, if not excluded.

Pattern recognition – each user faces visualizations that are equivalent with what is experienced in the real world, to which the human perception is optimized

Unlimited data representation:

With VR enterprises can combine and gather data from different sources (like video, audio, sound, text, images) in a 3D environment, thus enhancing experience and potential effectiveness of big data.

VR opens new opportunities to interpret and manipulate digital data in a way much more similar to how we interact with “real life” information. But, if a pie chart is not exciting enough in a 2D environment, transform it into 3D pie chart in VR is not going to help bring new insights. VR should be correctly used, so that we can take advantage of all our senses to receive extra layers of information. VR visualizations will not give improve understanding of size or numbers, but it will create an immersive experience which definitely will help users understand more clearly values behind numbers.

Can VR get better?

Data visualization with VR is a new and emerging medium, where many and interesting approaches have been explored with different goals.

Most of the current solutions were created to visualize specific types of data and use cases. Therefore, they are not easily scalable and adaptable to other types of data and, consequently, not easily applied to industries. Nevertheless, most of these solutions are still at prototype stage and the added value remains uncertain as they have not been applied at a large industry scale.

Some applications focus on the VR promise as a storytelling medium, others on its promise for interactivity or collaboration, and others only for data visualization. However, most of them are specialized tools, being difficult to build a set of VR tools for any business, service or product. Each individual/company has its own requirements and data needs, and current solutions are not helping with that.

So how can this be improved? Short answer: by making it simpler, more intuitive and removing the bottleneck of execution. We will discuss this un further detail on our next blog post.

Virtual Reality is an immersive technology that take media beyond conventional screens using computer-generated graphics as a new communication medium. It can be used across your company from marketing and sales to training and data visualization. Whether you are a brand marketer, director of operations or head of HR, there are many ways you can deploy this technology to generate substantial revenue, productivity or safety returns 1.

VR has already a long history. In the 90s, VR saw a similar boom for 3D gaming. However, the technology was not able to meet all market expectations and customers became unsatisfied. Back in time, applications suffered from poor graphics, expensive prices, time lags and low computing power 2.

A similar hype started when Facebook acquired Oculus for $2bn in 2014. Since then, every year global investments in augmented and virtual reality (VR and AR) have been higher than any previous period and also with a more accelerated pace 3.

Investment records were broken in 2017 leading to a new high-water mark in augmented and virtual reality technology (AR and VR). According to Digi-Capital4, more than $3 billion in venture funding were raised in 2017 across 28 AR and VR categories.

Despite perceived slowdown in capital market, the overwall investment was still up 12% vs. 2016, and 3 times vs. 2015. Tools/ Enabling Technologies (40%) and Hardware (35%) still account for majority of total investment, partially due to large average deal size (only 25% by volume). There was a 5 times increase in deal count in enterprise/ verticals sector from 15 to 17, making it the sector where investors were most active 5. Corporate investors were the rising force in 2017 as more enterprises were exploring the use of AR and VR for different business cases.

As hardware shipment was growing slower than expectation, investors’ interests shifted from hardware and content (which rely on consumer penetration) to tools and technologies which can apply across content and platforms, and enterprise services which have faster product-market-fit validation and monetization cycle.

Most impressively, Magic Leap ($502 million), Improbable ($502 million), Unity ($400 million) and Niantic ($200 million) were the main companies with more than half of these investments 6. Other startups are repositioning their company positions (e.g. extend to AR/MR, target enterprise clients) and exploring alternative funding channels rounds (e.g. crowdsourcing, ICO).

Concerning geographical location for VR/AR investments, US is still the primary location (45%), and China is following closely (25%) with investment opportunities unique to the market 5.

As conclusion, the industry is still in its early stage with limited exit channels and limited cases of exits (under $100M with <20x return for seed/angel round investors) 5. However, it is expected that 2018 total VR/AR funding will increase or remain at a similar level of 2017 where tech giants (e.g. Apple, Google, Facebook) will continue to invest in disruptive technologies and mass media will draw more consumers and investors.

VR advances are still not limited to the creation of high-quality experiences. Current promises go beyond 3D contents, and we are starting to see a great effort to produce standalone VR headsets and haptic technologies that could drive future development paths for VR.

Past month, the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2018 showcased new fresh developments, namely with VR headsets, haptic devices controllers and wireless, which may shape the next generation of VR systems. Nevertheless, not only at CES but all around the globe, more and more devices and interactions are generated to enhance the user experience in VR.

In this article, we will explore devices with wireless features, controllers, haptic feedback and the most recent VR headsets.

VR headsets

HTC launched the HTC Vive PRO headset, which has increased its resolution by 78 percent to give viewers a closer-to-reality and more immersive experience. The upgraded version offers a 2880x1600 display (previously 2160x1200), a 615 pixel density, headphones and dual mics integrated in the headset. Moreover, they announced a wireless adaptor that will let users wirelessly access content through Intel’s WiGig technology. It received over 22 awards from CES 2018.

However, the HTC Vive PRO headset is still missing UHD/4K videom which are becoming common standards for displaying devices. To overcome this absence, the fifth version of the Pimax 8K VR Headset, announced at CES 2018, will start shipping on the second quarter of 2018. Despite the resolution of 7640 x 2160 due to a combination of two 3820 x 2160 lenses and a 200-degree field of view and a resolution, people complain about its weight and lack of ergonomics.

A more futuristic headset was presented by the Looxid Labs. The LooxidVR headset aims to provide a system for human behavior research by capturing user reactions. It includes two eye-tracking cameras, six EEG sensors and HTC’s Vive X technology, that can measure eye movement and brain activity resulting in valuable information about the user’s emotions. As a result, they won the Best of Innovation Award at CES 2018 and the Startup Battlefield prize at Tech Crunch Disrupt San Francisco 2017.

Other big players have also written and changed their story in terms of VR headsets. The Chinese giant, Xiaomi, settled a partnership with Facebook as a hardware partner to launch two VR products: Facebook’s Oculus Go and Mi VR.

Lenovo was another player who launched a standalone VR headset with no connection to wires, PCs or phones. The major benefits are the easiness to setup and the ability to record, watch and share VR content. To complement this, Lenovo will provide a camera with Daydream technology to let users capture their own VR video in 180 degrees and watch it on Lenovo Mirage Solo.

Haptic devices

Everyone wants to be seamlessly, effortlessly and entirely immersed in VR. Many devices have been suggested to let users feel textures, weight, smell, temperature and impact of virtual objects. VR can never be too immersive, at least until you feel touching the void.

Several gloves have been suggested to solve an enduring problem in VR, namely to feel what you touch. Contact CI’s Maestro Haptic Glove was considered one of the most impressive demos at CES 2018. It allowed people to experience the sensation of touching in things that do not exist in our reality, while simulating the tension, pressure, and push back of virtual objects. It is able to capture a wide range of hand movements and provide immersion benefits due to the haptic feedback on each fingertip. Maestro system uses biomimicry to generate tension along each finger of the glove.

The Dexmo glove, designed by a team of Chinese and European roboticists, uses a miniaturized force-feedback solution to let users grasp and hold items in VR. Unlike other VR gloves that use vibration motors or electrodes for feedback, the Dexmo employs a mechanical system that applies varying degrees of torque to the fingers.

Haptx is another company trying to overcome this challenge. Haptx Skin is a microfluidic smart textile that delivers high fidelity tactile feedback. The gloves have more than 100 points where air bubbles can be inflated to displace your skin and make you feel something as you move your hand through the virtual world. Haptx combines this with motion-tracking technology to figure out where your hand is in a 3D space and the kind of feedback it should send to your hand.

In addition to glove devices, a Korean startup's TactSuit created a wireless kit consisting of a haptic mask, two haptic sleeves and a haptic vest with 87 feedback points (seven on the face, 20 on the front of the vest, another 20 on the back, and 20 on each sleeve) powered by eccentric rotating mass vibration motors. The clear advantage with such a high density of feedback points is the development of more immersive experiences.

Unfortunately, many solutions are still not ready for market and with low price. Let’s wait for future updates.

Controllers

We are currently living in a moment in which is difficult to find the best ways of controlling and manipulating the VR world. Peripheral makers around the world are trying to solve this issue, by suggesting a wide range of devices that capture our movements, brain and muscle activity, voice, and translate this information to the virtual world.

Recently, the Teslasuit has also proven quite a significant progress towards a more immersive VR experience, working both as a haptic device and controller. This full-body suit with haptic feedback, motion capture, and temperature/climate control, will take VR experiences to something closer to out-of-body experiences. From 46 haptic points in real time, it can simultaneously stimulate multiple muscle groups. On the other hand, the suit includes 14 motion capture sensors that basically write your body into a virtual space, which may be used to create a VR personalized experience through the creation of an Avatar.

Wireless

Finally, MSI, Zotac, HP and Alienware have all announced portable backpacks that let you carry around a powerful PC to run VR - and to literally run while in VR.

We are now on full gas on the VR exploration... What about you - will you be an early-adopter of any of these devices?

We live in the era of digital! Although it is a great time to join the startup ecosystem, it gets progressively harder to cut through the noise and stay ahead of competitors. Great opportunities also mean higher competition.

Having a good product and team is not enough anymore. Today, it is crucial to become recognized and visible not only within the VR community but also within the other communities. Making all of this possible is when the secret sauce is born.

Therefore, one of our biggest challenges with Dali is to create a positive brand experience which will ensure that future clients will connect and engage with Dali-VR. Building such awareness is not easy but we put together a strategy. With Dali-VR being at the very beginning of the business lifecycle, we decided to create two independent campaigns to increase our brand awareness: Digital Growth Hacking and Participation in Events.

In the Digital Growth Hacking campaign, our aim was to create our presence in the digital world. To achieve this, we developed our website in such a way visitors can understand our story, product features, team and latest news by checking our blog. In the end, we hope to contribute to an online community who trusts our brand and follows our growth. Additionally, we set up accounts in the social networks that fit our marketing strategy and could maximize our online reach: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Crunchbase.

Besides the online strategy, we needed to establish an offline presence. Because of this, we invested in the participation of events. Looking at the technology landscape in terms of events, we decided to be present at Web Summit as we’re based in Lisbon and TechCrunch Disrupt in Berlin as this is one of the biggest global events for startups and VCs.

In both events we were exposed to a series of talks and workshops by many great thinkers. On one hand, the hot topic at Web Summit was Artificial Intelligence and its impact on human kind’s future. Topics such as Big Data, Blockchain, VR/AR, Automated cars and HealthTech were also discussed by tech giants like Intel, Microsoft, Google and IBM. Apart from this, we had the opportunity to showcase and pitch our solution in many meetings.

As an eager-to-learn startup we had two full days of new experiences at TechCrunch. On day 1, we could showcase our demo at the Startup Alley and connect with investors, tech leaders, press and attendees. The day after was composed of several talks with a strong focus on the cryptocurrency hype and the possibility of an imminent bubble.

One of the major benefits from being present in these two events was the networking and new connections we were able to create. Additionally, we met many developers and executives who were interested in using and adopting our solution for their business. In terms of market trends and competitor analysis, these events proved to bring valuable feedback. Finally, we could build upon our reputation and brand awareness in the technology and VR fields which will unlock future developments, collaborations and achievements to hopefully lead the way for the creation of the next rocket company.

The buzz of Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) has been around for a couple of years. And some of us have been wondering – are these technologies living to their hype?

In the digital world, travelling between destinations can happen in the blink of an eye, new realities can be built and explored and trial and error is the modus operandi. The potential arising from emerging technologies is going to be enormous, impacting every field of business: from marketing to sales, medicine to gaming; finance or production, training or practical application1.

VR, in specific, is already being used by many companies as a cost effective way of developing new products and services. Why spending time creating a physical prototype, if you can build one in VR and, in the meantime, saving resources and increasing efficiency?

In the recent years, several tipping-points have been forecasted in the AR/VR industry, mainly due to a kicking-start investment from Facebook. But they were not the only ones. We should highlight other active investors in this industry, like: Rothenberg Ventures was considered the most active, specialized in seed-stage VR and AR start-ups. The second most active investor was boostVC, an accelerator focusing on blockchain tech and VR. In third place, there was Vive X which is an accelerator created by HTC2.

Other major AR/VR corporate investors include Google, Microsoft, Samsung and Sony that contributed to a growing confidence and expectation of the market 2. In fact, Facebook and Apple allocated 1000 people to develop projects related with these technologies. Apple’s investment in AR is considered a booster by many people as it can leverage its existing customer base to commercialize this emerging technology. Nevertheless, Google already launched Tango, an API that allows the development of AR apps, but its success it’s far from settled. Therefore, we cannot predict how these giant’s moves will influence and shape the AR/VR billion dollar industry of tomorrow.

What we know is that early-stage industries still need a high level of investment to help companies developing diversified robust solutions until a dominant design is achieved. Until 2016, VCs and corporate investors invested $2.3 billion in VR/AR startups, which is equivalent to an impressive 300% investment growth in 12 months, according to Digi-Capital3.

Though, we also know that get a small part of this investment can be a really hard tasks. One of the alternatives for investment seeking is attending to technology related events and identifying VCs who may be interested in your start-up business. An example, companies can attend tos Web Summit which will happen in November in Lisbon, Portugal. More than 60,000 attendees from more than 150 countries will be gathering for four days. There are a lot of reasons to attend to this kind of events, mainly:

Meeting with experts and influencers face to face;

Position yourself as an expert to build a reputation among your peers;

New networking and educational opportunities;

Encounter new vendors and suppliers;

Have fun.

Considering this, and according to our interests (VR, of course), we summarized the most relevant top investors, mainly for VR/AR, marketplaces, enterprise software, business analytics and big data.

The allure of tele-transporting ourselves for alternative realities by simply using a VR headset is very strong. This scenario looks like a far-fetched and futuristic episode from a sci-fi movie, though Virtual Reality can actually transform it into something reachable or widely available.

With the technological advances, VR headsets (e.g. Oculus, HTC Vive, Samsung Gear VR) are becoming affordable enough for mass use and for a wider range of applications. It is no longer just for the entertainment industry.

Today, VR is already creating a brand of how we experience the world!

As soon as these technologies mature and prices come down, VR offers limitless opportunities in terms of visualization, content and engagement1.

By creating believable, explorable and interactive 3D worlds, with VR you can create breathtaking possibilities. With VR, anyone can showcase products in three dimensions, manipulate them in real time while taking advantage of all the context and available features just like in real life.

Marketers are always exploring new possibilities to create remarkable and unique experiences with their brand. With VR, they can give consumers innovative possibilities to increase empathy, develop more authentic connection with products and deeper ways to interact and experience a brand.

Studies have already shown that VR can be an incredibly powerful emotional engagement tool, even more so than TV2.

Your products will tell a new story!

Every week new and exciting VR applications are promising to revolutionize the world of brand experiences.

But the VR industry is still at early stage, only scratching some of its features.

According to Yes Lifecycle Marketing3, 57% of retail aren’t even thinking that VR is relevant to their organization. And Marketo4 reported that only 30% of Forbes Global 2000 B2C companies are experimenting VR or AR this year.

It is expected that the use of this technology will dramatically expand next years, as developers get accustomed to using VR5.

With Dali-VR we want to facilitate such process by delivering a low-code and modular platform, where anyone can create customized VR worlds.

Non-technical users without 3D programming knowledge can intuitively and easily build and edit VR environments, without the involvement of specialists and without touching a single line of code. Designers and Marketers will be able to create and imagine new ways of interaction, visualization, disrupting the way how products are shown to the public.

Everyone knows that VR marketing can be a gold mine opportunity, but the best strategies are still unknown. Dali-VR can give you an opportunity and inspiration to kickstart your own VR marketing campaign. Get ready to take your marketing experience to the next level with Dali-VR.

Here are other exciting and immersive VR marketing experiences for you to explore: